Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years—enriched by memories of individual, family, and community triumphs and tragedies. In vivid, compelling accounts, men and women from all walks of life tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. At the same time, Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how black Southerners fought back against the system—raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival and an important part of the American past that is crucial for us to remember.

Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this landmark in African American oral history is now available in an affordable paperback edition and, for the first time, as an e-book with audio of the interviewees—in their own voices.